I thought the storm had taken it with it.
For a brief, fragile window, the pain loosened its grip—and I let myself believe. I shouldn’t have, but I did.
Now it’s back.
And it’s vicious.
More GP visits.
More medications with names I can barely pronounce and side effects I never asked for.
More time off work that fills me with guilt and quiet panic.
More waiting. More explaining. More advocating when all I want to do is lie very still and not exist inside my body for a while.
It’s the relentlessness that gets me. Not just the pain—but the way it eats time, energy, certainty. The way every day becomes a negotiation: Can I manage this? What will it cost me later? How much do I have to give just to get through?
And then the thoughts arrive.
It makes me think of Dad.
How often they fobbed him off with benign explanations. How many reassurances, how many delays—until the truth finally arrived fully formed and already too late to outrun.
Last week, a girl I knew from school died.
Forty years old.
Cancer.
I can’t stop wondering how many times she was told it was nothing. How often she was sent home with reassurance instead of answers.
I’m not saying I have cancer.
I need to say that clearly, even if only to keep myself anchored.
But I have already lived through eighteen months of oncology tests. Scans. Bloods. Waiting rooms thick with antiseptic and dread. And still—no answers. Just we’ll monitor it, come back if it changes, there’s no progression.
Those issues remain.
Thank fuck they haven’t escalated.
But they also haven’t gone away.
And I don’t know how to keep doing this.
Because the truth—the part no one prepares you for—is that the mental anguish is worse than the pain. The pain hurts, yes. But the waiting corrodes. It drags old grief to the surface and asks you to relive it with new faces and new possibilities.
Every ache becomes a question.
Every delay feels dangerous.
Every reassurance sounds like a story I’ve heard before.
And beneath all of that sits the biggest fear of all.
Leaving them.
My Tills.
My moon cat Billie.
My boys.
The plans we have that are so close now they feel almost touchable—our home, our future, the life we’re finally building.
I know this is worst-case thinking. I know that.
But this is how my brain works. It doesn’t leap there for drama—it goes there because it’s learned to.
I have been left before.
At my lowest.
Broken and bleeding and needing nothing more than the basest human comfort—only to be met with coldness. Told I was dramatic. Too much. An inconvenience.
That memory lives in my body.
So now my fear spirals forward:
How long before work gets fed up?
How long before the absences, the appointments, the disruption wear thin?
How long before Joel can’t deal with the moaning, the pills, the plans constantly being rearranged around pain?
I hate that I even think this.
I hate that illness doesn’t just hurt—it isolates, it interrogates your worth, it whispers that love has limits.
I am so tired of being “brave.”
So tired of being “patient.”
So tired of advocating for myself while trying not to sound hysterical. Of walking the tightrope between be vigilant and don’t catastrophise.
This isn’t drama.
It’s trauma memory.
I don’t want certainty because I’m dramatic.
I want it because I’ve seen what happens without it.
Right now, I am scared—not just of pain, not even of diagnosis—but of being unheard, unheld, and left behind again.
And that fear is louder than anything my body is doing.